Driverless Trains: the quintessential Tory policy

Driverless trains are part of TfL's new settlement. It enables the government to claim they're smashing the last union with real power in the country (levelling up!), as well as claim they're at the forefront of technology (in London, though, so not really levelling up because levelling up is only allowed in Not London). 

There's several issues here, one of which is cost. TfL recently abandoned Piccadilly line signalling upgrades due to lack of funds from central government. Driverless trains, of course, would require a lot of new signalling, in order to work with the new AI-driver. TfL also recently put on hold tunneling out the Bakerloo line extension due to lack of funds from central government. Driverless trains, of course, would require the addition of safety-gates on all platforms, which means those curved-platforms of Embankment, Waterloo, and hundreds of others, would all have to straightened out by tunneling out a larger station and, for example, shifting them sideways. 

The final issue is, as London Reconnections put so succinctly -- any AI driver that is advanced enough to navigate the ancient London Underground will finish its first shift and immediately join a union. 

So it's some way off, then. Like a lot of Tory policies it's all scary and disrupting -- and then nothing happens.

In some ways, "Driverless Trains" is the ultimate post-Thatcher Tory policy. 

You could apply Driverless Trains to the entire Tory policy output. Driverless trains, on its own, is not an impossible or even a bad idea. But to achieve it, you need to either:

a) Completely replace the entire London Underground

b) Invest in an entirely new, elevated rail line, like a central London DLR, that would be built driverless from the get-go. 

Both of these are, as you can imagine, expensive, and, if done properly, would provide adequate public transport to London for decades to come. I might be cynical but neither of these are particularly Tory things to do.

It's perhaps emblematic of their entire approach. Make a claim on an endpoint, put no funds into achieving it, then claim either everyone else has failed you, or that we need to be frugal in times like these. Meanwhile, you pick up that distant carrot of Driverless Trains and hurl it into the horizon once more, for the next election. 

The Driverless Trains fallacy can be applied to Whitehall. The government has long stated its desire to cut back on Whitehall staff, or to shift civil servants to far flung parts of the country in an effort to boost those areas. Fair enough. But here comes the Driverless Train: without moving the government itself, Whitehall will never really move. Ministers won't be moved out of London, so their top civil servants won't be moved out of London. The servants directly below them won't be moved out, until eventually someone is moved out, but they're so unimportant that they're ultimately replaced, back in London, with someone else. The new regional Whitehall office becomes just that, regional, and is eventually wound up. Without replacing the London Underground, an AI-train can't run.

Levelling Up, in general terms, is about boosting England's underperforming areas. In cynical terms, is about smashing down London and allow the regions to become successful, if only in relative terms to the fall of London. In realistic terms, it should be about replicating London's success in those English regions. But here we come to the Driverless Train of Levelling Up: London's success is largely through its devolved government and its control over its own transport. Central Government has repeatedly shown it despises not just the Mayor of London but the London Assembly itself, continuing to overrule planning permissions or even the London Plan. If you were really committed to Levelling Up the English regions, you'd also be committed to devolution. There is simply no other way to achieve it, short of blasting money into the regions (another very un-Tory thing to do). Of course, they say they want devolution, that they support English devolution. But they want it without laying any of the framework for it. Just like they want Driverless Trains without spending the money on a new Underground or a new light railway, they also want to give more power to the English regions by not actually giving them any power. 

I suppose the biggest Driverless Train in the government's world right now is post-Brexit trade. They can see an endpoint in their minds that they want but they cannot be bothered working it out or spending the money or making sure it works. As a result, Northern Ireland is in crisis. And crisis is, ultimately, all that Tory policies can ever hope to achieve. 

I Keep Crawling Back To You

The opening, tumbling piano is almost too much to bear. You can get past the jagged little bursts of muted guitar that ease you into the song, but when the piano hits you in the soul, it's all over. That title, "Crawling Back To You", is somehow spoken by those piano chords. It sounds like someone falling to their knees. 

Somewhere between the piano and the drums, it sounds like the 90s. Not grunge, not hip-hop influences, but that weird bit of the 90s where the dinosaurs came back, as Eric Clapton creaked back into our lives, Pink Floyd put out another album, and everyone who had a hit album in the 70s put out at least one greatest hits album. The piano and drums sound like a 90s dinner party. Maybe it's a memory only I have, but it sounds like men getting into hi-fi systems in order to play the new Clapton Unplugged as crystal clear as possible, and as completely inappropriate dinner party music. It sounds like Baby Boomer torment. If you were a Boomer and your marriage collapsed, it probably did so in the 90s. Maybe, it was soundtracked by "Crawling Back To You".

It's one of those songs that uses fairly cryptic lyrics in the verses, before cutting you off at the knees with a blunt, straight-to-the-point chorus line. I keep crawling back to you. In a strange way, because they're so different, it reminds me of the biblical language in the verses of Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Power of Love"--

Ah, fuck--sorry, the guitar solo just hit. Jesus Christ. Have you heard the live version, on the recently released Wildflowers and All The Rest? Good God. What was a fairly restrained guitar-interpretation of inner torment becomes a wounded dog howl in the live version. You could probably play anything in this bit, as long as it's in key, and as long as you just hit the thing with the right amount of force. 

Anyway. Back to the lyrics. The Power of Love. Right? "Dreams are like angels / They keep bad at bay / Love is the light / Scaring darkness away" -- it's utter bollocks, but it's well intentioned bollocks. You feel the narrator aiming for Great Art, a huge painting, a big gesture. He's reaching up at the sky and trying to take a swipe at the moon. But it falls short, and he drops the bullshit for a vulnerable, heart-stopping second: "I'm so in love with you". It kills me every time. It hits even harder later on when the bollocks is kicked up a notch: "This time we go sublime / Lovers entwined divine / Love is danger, love is pleasure / Love is pure, the only treasure" -- what? I mean, I get it, but, what? And then, again, "I'm so in love with you". He tosses the easel to the floor, kicks over the paints, throws out his notebook. I'm so in love with you. 

Tom Petty does the same here.  "The ranger came with burning eyes / The chambermaid awoke surprised" -- it almost sounds like "I Want You" by Bob Dylan, and they perform a similar trick. Here's line after line of poetry, followed by a chorus which clears that all away. I want you. I'm so in love with you. I keep crawling back to you. 

Video rental stores and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Before Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+, there were video stores. I'd like to say it seems weird now but it doesn't. I could imagine video stores coming back, even now. It seems like movies are more popular than ever and if someone somehow came up with a way to make physical video tapes a profit making business, people would go get them. Eventually the streaming services will merge and de-merge and monetise and throw adverts on what is already a pay-service, to a point where you find yourself locked out once again and marveling at the concept of being able to rent a single movie without signing up for a year's worth of streaming. 

In some places, though, video rental shops never really went away. Where I grew up, in Hamilton, NZ, you could map the city by video stores alone. There was Hillcrest Video Ezy, Hamilton East United Video, The Source just over the bridge in town, the big United Video on the way out of town and into Frankton, The Source in Frankton. That's three competing chains in one small town alone. A fourth, Civic Video, inexplicably joined them in the mid-2000s.  

Each store required its own membership, even within a chain, so you'd end up with multiple Video Ezy accounts if you found yourself stranded in a zone of Hamilton without a video store less than 300 metres from you. It could happen! 

We usually went to the United Video in Hamilton East, once a week, one video for a week's rental. It was on the way home from the central city, and probably had the best parking which was obviously a deciding factor for my dad. United Video also had a pretty large range, although they seemed to lose interest in having actual categories of films and instead opted to just bung everything in an ever-growing 'Highly Recommended' section that soon took up 3/4s of the shop. 

For some reason, we once branched out and went to The Source in Frankton. The Source was weird. There were fewer of them, they had a weird name, and they had the most constantly played TV ads despite having fewer stores. After years of United Video, The Source was a strange new world with strange new videos. An unfamiliar children's section located perilously close to the horror section, with a few adult cartoons like Heavy Metal randomly thrown in there by either some mischievous teenage employee, or someone who had no idea that they did cartoons for adults. 

Usually we would only sign up for a membership to a new video store if they had something we couldn't find anywhere else. This time, that something, was a previously unknown Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film. I'd seen the first one, and Secrets of the Ooze, and even TMNT 3: Turtles in Time. But here, at The Source Frankton, was apparently a fourth TMNT film. I couldn't believe it. 

My dad duly registered for an account at The Source and I rented out this incredible new film, got home, and popped it in the VCR.

The first hint that something was amiss was the box art. I can only assume I was overcome with a kind of delirium upon sighting a new TMNT film and didn't sober up until I'd got home. As I looked at the box, I noticed the turtles themselves looked a bit cheap, a bit weird, and Shredder was wearing possibly the most revealing crotchwear since David Bowie in Labyrinth. It was, essentially, Shredder's junk pushing out of the box art at the viewer. 

We hit play and the red flags continued. The film opened with an introduction sequence, featuring Russell the Rooster, a poorly designed and assembled puppet from a New Zealand children's show. That's weird, I thought. I didn't think TMNT had any connection to New Zealand. Maybe this was just a NZ-only bit tacked onto the start? Something for the local audience. Yeah. Despite this self-assurance, a wave of dread washed over me as the tape rolled. 

There were crowd noises. An audience seemed to be in this movie somehow. OK. Maybe it started with a crowd number. Vanilla Ice was in one of the other films. It's not completely out of the ordinary. Except this time it was a static shot. Even as a child, I could feel the difference between a movie camera angle and whatever this was. Lights came on. A curtain went up. More crowd cheering, noises. An announcer whooped, and the turtles bounded out onto the stage to perform an excruciating rock-rap number. 

My sister and I stared at the screen as this madness unfolded, at first laughing at it, and then cowering in embarrassment by association (we made the choice to rent this after all), before the sheer sadness set in as we realised this was the film we'd wasted this week's rental on. We had this thing for a week. 

I stared at Shredder's freaky mound one more time before silently placing the tape by the front door for Dad to return on his next drive past the video shop. 

rain fall from concrete coloured skies

I'm aware that Bic Runga's "Drive" is a New Zealand music cliche. It's a Nature's Best compilation, Sunday afternoon trapped in front of Squeeze, half an hour waiting on the line to StudyLink while you panic over the missed student allowance payment.

"My head's so heavy -- could this be all a dream?"

But I can't help it. It sounds like New Zealand to me. It sounds like 8mm film, like being nostalgic for a moment that's happening right in front of you.

"Let rain fall from concrete coloured skies"

And you can hear the soft New Zealand rain, the damp, wet ferns, the warm grey clouds hanging above your streets. The rain falls. It's always falling.

That sense of stillness, isolation, empty, boring, alone. Standing on a bridge in Hamilton, with only cars going past. No one walking, jogging -- just you. The river goes by underneath. Brown, muddy. The horizon is a neat triangle of river, trees, and bridge. Nothing blocks out the sun except the clouds, and there's so many clouds. That's one thing I miss. Clouds.

John Key, shrugging

New Zealand has reached a very strange moment in its political life.

On one hand, we've got the natural conclusion of the New Zealand politician: John Key, shrugging. That's it. That's all anyone in New Zealand ever wanted from their leaders. Forget Kirk's rousing, blood-pumping bootstraps-with-compassion speeches, forget Lange's wit and intelligence, forget Savage's implementation of policies that make pre-Labour New Zealand look like the wild west. Forget even Clark's centrist, evenhanded, cautious approach. What we've always wanted is a man so indifferent to the needs of his countrymen that he can't start a sentence without lurching it out of himself with a shrug of the shoulders.

This is what we like. Has the Auckland housing market eaten itself? Nah, it's not too bad. Does New Zealand have thousands of children going to school hungry? Nah, it's fine. Have my ministers been doing dodgy deals? I don't think New Zealanders really care about that. This is it -- New Zealand's political personality embodied in one cynical, jiggly-shouldered man. We (apparently) pride ourselves on innovation and doing things on our own, but in reality we're just cobbling stuff together and shrugging away any resulting workplace fatalities. We'd like to think we're laid back but really we chastise anyone who raises any concerns. It's less "She'll be right" than "Don't be a little bitch." John Key's shrugs and indifference tell us he doesn't care and neither should we, and we like that.

And, yet, oddly, on the other hand, he does care. He cares so much that he got Campbell Live taken off air. New Zealand's Prime Minster got a current affairs show yanked off a private broadcaster due to its politically troubling content. He cares so much he believed Campbell Live had it in for him and his government -- never mind that Campbell used to regularly wind up Helen Clark. He simply thought John Campbell was being a prick, and put the hit out on his show. One can make all sorts of comparisons to police states and communists and censorships and whatever else -- but that would only raise the blood pressure and the spectre of caring too much.

The weather is warmer, the sun is up longer, my curtains are now open -- and I'm still wandering around in my briefs

The weather is warmer, the sun is up longer, my curtains are now open -- and I'm still wandering around in my briefs.

In the age of central heating you can go from one season to another and barely register a change -- if, like me, you only leave the house to go sit in another building. The only real sign that the Earth has drifted through space is that when you get in from work there's sunlight streaming in through the curtains.

And so you open them. Leaves, flowers, birds, sunlight. Lovely.  But then your whole routine is disrupted. Before, with the curtains shut, you could walk around half-dressed or even undressed and do whatever the hell you like. Being winter, you were probably dressed in some slob-configuration of Buzz Lightyear onesie with a Ninja Turtle onesie over the top, with your arse somehow peeking out. No coming in from work and throwing off your restrictive work clothing for you anymore. Now that the curtains are open, you have to be dressed at all times.

Walking around naked in your own home should be part of the unwritten rule of the Somebody Else's Problem field. Obviously, your neighbour across the street CAN see you swinging your genitals about in the living room, and your neighbour at the back CAN see you gamely trying to cook tea without heating up essential parts of your own body. But they shouldn't acknowledge it, lest they find you staring back at them, all judging eyes and nipples framed in a yellow-lit kitchen window.

I believe all neighbours should follow the time-tested rules of the invisible ignorance field, best exemplified when someone walks past your living room window. They can see you, you can see them, but, so long as neither of you acknowledge this hideous fact, the field of ignorance is intact and we can all go on with our day safe in the knowledge that we are the only human beings on the entire planet.

However, this precious field is easily broken. All it takes is a passerby to -- god forbid -- wave at you while you're sat in your own damn living room and it's gone. You're no longer in your house, you're on display, in an exhibition, in a glass casing. They might as well kick in the windows.

This field is also in effect within a single dwelling. The flatshare tends to have multiple fields working at any given time. A flatmate exiting the shower can expect to make it from the bathroom to their bedroom without their hair, body or choice of towel being commented upon, because the field says they are invisible. People in flatshares don't go to the toilet, they simply cease to exist for the duration, and then return to the living room and our plane of existence with no questions asked. This is a delicate formula and, like the rubbernecking bastard ogling in through your living room window, can be easily broken. When a flatmate is in their bedroom with the door open, another flatmate cannot talk to them, or comment on their room, or even assume that because their door is open, they're available for any immediate appointments. The invisible field of ignorance is at play, and if it's broken, a flatmate in their room with their door open is suddenly turned into a kind of life-sized advent calendar, simply waiting in a little closet for someone to walk past and strike up a conversation. They now have no choice but to move out and seek more ignorance-field-attuned flatmates elsewhere.

Since most people have had to endure the flatshare situation at some point in their lives, I don't think it's too much to expect that they can re-engage with the invisible field of ignorance during the warmer months. It is a mutually beneficial understanding that works both ways, allowing us all to enjoy imaginary privacy in our crammed together homes, as we traipse about in front of the windows, all cheery summer buttocks and breezy spring genitals.

One Fine Day in the Waitrose Free Coffee Queue

INT. WAITROSE - MORNING

Customers queue at the free coffee machine. Quite a lengthy queue, 7 people deep.

A man stands waiting at the machine as it whips up a cappuccino.

Someone enters the shop. Attempts to pass through the queue on their way somewhere else. THE QUEUE growls, fidgets, begrudgingly lets him through. It's tense.

The cappuccino customer finishes, and the queue jolts forward. The FIRST IN LINE CUSTOMER stabs at the buttons.

FIRST

"Milk... low?"

The queue jostles and rhubarbs, mild panic.

STAFF MEMBER

Don't worry, Pete's just gone down to get some. Won't be a minute.

The queue nods and mutters to itself.

THE QUEUE 

Oh, ok, he's just gone down to get some, yes, yes, alright, all is fine, all is good...

Someone enters the shop, attempts to pass through the queue on their way somewhere else. THE QUEUE growls, fidgets, begrudgingly lets her through.

They stare ahead at the coffee machine. "Milk Low" blinks back at them. 

Beat.

FIRST

What's taking him so long?  

THIRD

What could he possibly be doing down there?

SECOND

Why don't we just go grab it ourselves?

FIRST

What? We can't do that.

SECOND

Why not? It's free out the machine. We could just go grab it! 

FOURTH

All the milk in the shop is free, then?

FIFTH 

And the coffee?

SIXTH 

And the water?  

SEVENTH

Let's just fucking grab it!

SECOND

Grab it all! Grab it all!

Someone enters the shop, attempting to pass through the queue on their way somewhere else. 

THE QUEUE

Yaaarrrrgh!!

The Queue splits apart, grabbing bottled water, hefting 3-litre bottles of milk out of the shelves, sweeping bags of coffee into handbags, booting over stacks of baskets--

THE QUEUE

Grab it all! Grab it all! Milk low! MILK LOW!

They barrel out of the shop, milk and water and coffee and pastries and ready-meals scattering around them, as the SEVENTH in line rips the machine out of the wall and dashes outside, wires trailing along the ground after him.